The Evolution of Christs and Christianities will surprise the most gullible and the most skeptical. It examines the development of the concept of the Christ and the development of Christ movements starting precisely two thousnd years ago in 6 CE. It suggests a startling new answer to the question, "Did Jesus Exist?" The first decade of the 21st century has seen an unprecedented questioning of the origins of Christianity. Works by authors such as Robert Price (
Incredible Shrinking Jesus), Bart D. Ehrman (
Lost Christianities : The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew),Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy (
The Jesus Mysteries), Earl Doherty (
The Jesus Puzzle), Archarya S (
The Christ Conspiracy), Robert Eisenman (
James the Brother of Jesus,), Michael O. Wise (
The First Messiah), Burton Mack (
The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy ), and Dan Brown (
The Da Vinci Code) challenge commonly held assumptions about these origins. This book similarly challenges many orthodox premises. It examines the possible reasons for the many contradictions, changes and breaking points in the narratives of the books of the New Testament. It deconstructs these texts to suggest an alternative history behind them. The book offers evidence for five major hypotheses: 1) Bishop Eusebius' fourth century
Church History is a tendentious, biased and generally distorted picture of the development of early Christianity. Scholars who rely on it are unwittingly promoting a false, fairytale-like ideology rather than promulgating an authentic history of people and social groups. 2) A woman, wrote the earliest layer of the canonical gospel tales. She was probably named Mary and may have been a daughter of a Jewish High Priest. 3) Most of the words of Jesus of Nazareth found in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke were originally from texts about John, the Nazarene Prophet, A.K.A. John, the Baptist. 4) Important features of the characters of Jesus and the Apostle Peter came from a Samaritan magician called Simon Magus. 5) The major Christian group in Jerusalem in the first century was The Church of God. This institution was associated with James the Just and opposed by Paul the Tarsan. It apparently made its money by training slaves in obedience for widows. It looked towards Joshua (Jesus) of Nun for salvation as opposed to the laws of Moses and, like Paul, it knew nothing of any Jesus from Nazareth Taken together, these hypotheses suggest that Jesus of Nazareth was not a real historical person. He was primarily a complex literary creation. He was a combination of various texts about Joshua of Nun, John, the Nazarene Prophet, James the Just, Simon Magus and various other literary characters. However some of these earlier characters may have been loosely based on, or intended to refer to, various historical persons who lived in the first half of
About the Author
Jay Raskin has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of South Florida and a B.F.A. in filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has taught Philosophy, Humanities and Film courses at half a dozen colleges in Central Florida in the past ten years. He has produced two feature films (Electra, 1993, and I Married a Vampire, 1984, distributed by Troma Inc, New York City). He has been a moderator at the Yahoo discussion group JesusMysteries for the past five years. He is originally from Queens, New York. He now lives in Orlando with his wife of 20 years, Vicky, and 11 year old daughter, Aphrodite. He currently teaches for the University of Phoenix.